Skepticism

EVENTS

Y’all going to church today?

I think I’ll skip it, even though I’m staying at my mother’s house, which is right next door to some freaky conservative Protestant shitbox church. They aren’t promising to talk about evolution, which would at least be interesting.

I do like the little addendum someone pasted on to the sign, at least.

It is a little weird to think that all across the country round about now, in every church, some guy is standing up and lying and saying the magic words, “He is risen”, when he’s not. He died, people, and he rotted away, and his myth has been used ever since to oppress and delude and confuse and frighten people.

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What a horribly fucked up holiday this Easter thing. Some lady ate the wrong piece of fruit. God curses all of humanity for this ghastly crime. To redeem humanity, God sacrifices a version of himself called Jesus to himself. God forgives humanity, kind of, and now people can go to heaven for kissing his ass.

Here’s the question I always have… what kind of a sacrifice is it for God to sacrifice himself, when God can live forever? I feel like being crucified would pretty much suck horribly, but then after that you live forever. So what really did God/Jeebus lose by “dying?”

Your problem petejohn is that you connected all the stories. There’s a reason why the stories are in different books. Just think of them as weekly episodes of a TV series, just remotely connected to the previous episode through returning characters.

The Christ story only makes sense if you are part of an honor culture. In an honor culture disrespect to an authority requires immediate revenge and retaliation. Honor has been insulted. Human imperfection thus demands the payment of blood. The only way to get all teary-eyed and grateful that Jesus “paid the price of sin” is if this ancient honor culture system still makes sense.

It doesn’t. Substitutionary atonement fails on multiple levels.

I wonder how many Christians are secretly retranslating the Easter message into something which sounds more reasonable to them.

The only way to get all teary-eyed and grateful that Jesus “paid the price of sin” is if this ancient honor culture system still makes sense.

Or, as in the case of the Philippines, if the savages you originally converted weren’t able to read or write, and you had to teach them this Christianity business by demonstration. And since the Catholic death cult stories fused seamlessly with the animism cults of the time ater some centuries, they have crucifictions and drastic replays of Christian myths to this day.

We begged out of church with the folks to clean the house for Easter dinner. Some family traditions go on especially when backed by feasting and wine. My six-year-old helped me put things in perspective. “I don’t believe Jesus can come back from the dead,” he says. All that stuff about spring and Ishtar flew right over his head. Today isn’t about resurrection, or rebirth, Jesus or the Easter Bunny, nor even family and food. Today is about candy, and he’s really excited.

Christianity might be saved with a reframing starting from the beginning. For example, the whole concept of “original sin” from Genesis has got it backwards. Human beings should be celebrating the story of Eve and the “forbidden fruit.” The Original Virtue lies in “find out for yourself.”

Atheists (IMHO) ought to reclaim the story and celebrate her mythical action, which made us human instead of spending life with the other animals. Sure, it’s a mixed blessing/curse, this “being responsible for our own actions” thing, having foresight to see potential consequences and sometimes doing the wrong thing anyway. But without it, we wouldn’t be exploring Mars.

@1 & 16: Indeed. Even when I was nominally a believer I was a little puzzled by the concept of Jesus dying for our sins, considering that a core belief of Christianity is that no one dies, ever. Death is just a transition to another kind of life.

Likewise, if you consider that Christians think that Jesus rose from the dead and is sitting in glory at the right hand of God, co-ruling the Universe, there doesn’t seem to much of a sacrifice involved.

Granted, being scourged and crucified is a pretty awful way to die, but it’s by no means uniquely awful. Some diseases are at least as bad, and go on much longer, not to mention the tortures humans still sometimes inflict on each other (not infrequently inflicted by Christians on other Christians over theological disputes).

In order to understand why Christians (of which I am most definitely not one) call it Good Friday you have to be willing to think about christian theology.

Some of these early christians were actually fairly sophisticated intellectually even if they were basically irrational on the main points. IF you believe in an all loving all powerful GOD then you have a problem when you notice that there is bad stuff happening in the world. This is the so-called “problem of good and evil” and the early christian theologians came up with the answer that “God has a plan, it is an infinitely great and wonderful plan, and when we are reborn in heaven we will all see exactly how and why all the so called evil events in the world were actually necessary for the eventual working out of this vast, wonderful plan.”

Thus in the “God’s plan” myth, Evil is actually Good in disguise. And as these same people believed (or said they believed) that it was the death of Jesus that was the pivotal moment in this plan, it was, they reasoned, not actually evil, but in fact the greatest good of all.

I know Paul was a bit of a galley setter *, but I don’t think he made it that far.

Well, Magellan did(and got himself killed rather unceremoniously on some beach 50 years before the main Catholic invasion force arrived), and the Conquistadores did who came after him…And they managed to fuse the natural religions of the Phils with the whole Catholic zombie cult pretty good, you really have to admire it.

The Easter stuff gets picked over pretty quickly from my experience, so I say get in early and get the candy today unless you want to be stuck with stale Peeps.

(Or any Peeps, for that matter)

Someone mentioned on twitter how peculiar it was that they didn’t name it “Bad Friday”, considering.

Well, it’s “good” that the son of God who was really God got crucified so that he could fill that…yeah, I can’t make it make any more sense than anyone else thus far. Funny though, one of my old childhood friends, who seems to have converted to Islam in the meantime (nice liberal Islam though) wished everyone a “Happy Good Friday”. We were both raised Catholic, and I’m pretty sure that, as good as that Friday is supposed to be, you’re not supposed to be happy on that day.

I don’t know. Easter tends to come near the tail end of what is usually the worst time of year for me, and this year is no exception. So la de dah.

When I was a computer operator, one of our customers was a school board. Their interface with us was a Christadelphian. If he was an example of the honesty and integrity of that cult, then it is no wonder that they would lie about evolution.

This product of biblical morality worked on a biblical card file (this was the early 1970’s) and had us run, list and print his output. This was all done “on the job”. I did record the billable time against account “BIBL” in the hopes that someone at the school board would ask what it was about. Unfortunately no one did.

Our relationship was not mutually respectful, but I remained professional in my interactions. My fellow operator (also an atheist) once told me that Alex C. and I had a personality conflict. I immediately corrected him by stating “he has no personality to conflict with”. I once remarked that AC and his identical twin (imaginary) could share a toilet seat, what with him being a half-ass.

I recognize that it is a generalization, but if this guy was any indication of what his cult attracts or creates then they must be a sorry group indeed. Humorless, stealing and lying for the “greater glory of god” and generally disagreeable. How many other cults would this description fit?

I went, to keep the peace in the family. Got a free egg bake out of the deal. The pastor actually said that, part of the proof of the missing body is that “wouldn’t Pilate have searched for the body, to prove that he really hadn’t risen?” No, he wouldn’t have, he wouldn’t have cared, assuming Jesus even existed, he had just crucified him, he would have had no idea that we would still be talking about this today and would have felt no need to nip the movement in the bud. Statements like the pastor’s demonstrate the self-centered view they have of their legend.

Here’s the question I always have… what kind of a sacrifice is it for God to sacrifice himself, when God can live forever? I feel like being crucified would pretty much suck horribly, but then after that you live forever. So what really did God/Jeebus lose by “dying?”

What always confused me was the role of Judas. Like, he had to betray Jesus to get the whole shebangabang moving, right? Why isn’t he seen as a hero– someone who is willing to do the dirty job that no one else will– instead of a villain?

Anyway, today I’m celebrating by eating too much chocolate and hanging out with Esteleth. Boom.

Some years ago, when Boy was attending college out in western Pennsylvania, we went out to pick him up for spring break (which coincided with Easter). A church we drove by had a big billboard out front that read:

When I lived in Central America in the 70s, I knew a couple who were Christadelphian missionaries. They were a very strange pair. Extremely well educated and worldly in many ways, but obviously not in others.

Of the missionaries I have known (including some in-laws), they were the most reluctant to talk about their beliefs that I ever met. Maybe they sensed I was just being polite when I asked about what they believed, but it was exceedingly difficult to get them to say anything about, you know, the stuff I presumed they became missionaries to talk about.

I’ve always felt that way too about Judas. Jeebus had to die to set the whole thing off, so what’s the big deal about what Judas did? But then I suppose we’re expecting consistency, and that’s just, like, foolish or something.

Someone mentioned on twitter how peculiar it was that they didn’t name it “Bad Friday”, considering.

Maybe this was me :D The twisted Xian morality (bad = good, cruelty = love, etc) has been on my mind a lot lately, too. I posted about exactly this last night- (“Easter” is not about the torture and execution and alleged resurrection of Jesus, so these holidays should be called Resurrection Sunday and Crucifixion Friday) – and I found totally legit (!!111!!!!) Xian sources to back it up!

Jesus paid for our sins by DYING, which is bloody painful, resurrection was his reward for that pain he experienced. Or so they say… To say, “If God can’t die, then what was the ‘sacrifice’ to pay for our sins?”, kinda misses the whole points of the Christian theology. Death is nasty and he wouldn’t have gone through that at all if we weren’t sinful (by being descendants of bad Adam and evil Eve. And it wasn’t just dying, but all the torture of hanging on that cross for a whole afternoon (when most could hang for days). And Easter is celebrating his return from there to bless us all afterwords (if we don’t doubt like poor old Thomas).

Geewiz, I dunno, it’s all too silly to be comprehended. It’s so inconsistent and all….

Some years ago, when Boy was attending college out in western Pennsylvania, we went out to pick him up for spring break (which coincided with Easter). A church we drove by had a big billboard out front that read:

Help us Celebrate the Reserection! HE IS RISEN!

Damn near drove off the road while laughing.

And it was on the 10th anniversary of a certain blue pill.

Bahaha! It always cracks me up how often these typos seem to occur in the belief set, and how very frequently the typos wind up being ironic!

IIRC, the crucifixion was bit of sympathetic magic. The Jewish priests sacrificed a lamb at Passover, echoing the lamb’s blood on the doorways in Egypt that kept the Angel of Death away. Jesus was supposed to be the ultimate sacrificial lamb.

Sympathetic magic is symbolic, one thing representing another. That is the basis of Christianity, the same kind of symbolic reasoning as having voodoo dolls represent an enemy, and sticking a needle in causes harm. Very primitive reasoning, yet still accepted by Christians.

You know, if we’re honouring sacrifices made by fictional characters, I’m quite fond of Prometheus. He gave us fire, freeing us from the cold and the dark and the terrors of the wild, and actually got tortured for eternity for it (at least until Herakles showed up). Sure, fire allowed us to destroy ourselves in increasingly inventive new ways, but he gave us the option, when that bastard Zeus and the other Olympians would have had us frightened and shivering forever.

He gave men fire back – it was his pulling a prank on Zeus that made him so angry he took the fire away in the first place. Prometheus returning fire seriously enraged Zeus, and in retaliation, he created Pandora, the evil of evils. Y’know, woman.

Pandora was fashioned by Hephaestus out of clay and brought to life by the four winds, with all the goddesses of Olympus assembled to adorn her. “From her is the race of women and female kind,” Hesiod writes; “of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.”

Martyrdom has only occurred when the martyred party has been rendered demonstrably and permanently dead by a dominant religious or political authority in retaliation for the promotion of religious or political views not in keeping with those of the aforementioned authority. With regard to his failure to remain dead, Jesus does not meet the parameters of a martyr, so his case has been re-filed under “briefly tortured, escaped after weekend of solitary confinement.”. Please update your records accordingly.

(Having your hands and feet bound and being thrown into an erupting volcano in front of your followers as punishment for your beliefs? Martyrdom. Tripping over your shoelaces and landing face-first in an erupting volcano? Gruesome accidental death. Going hiking in a forest in a 7,000 year old crater, then going to the pub and telling everybody you’re back after three days in an active volcano? Moron.)